1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and system for finding matches between people, and more specifically to matching people connected to an online dating service.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet has become a popular medium for creating social relationships, and especially romantic relationships.
Many online dating websites exist, which allow user to view other users' profiles and contact those they are interested in.
Some dating websites try to match people according to their answers to a set of questions. Examples of these include www.chemistry.com, www.eharmony.com, and www.okcupid.com. Drawbacks of such methods are that they don't take into account physical appearance and that questionnaires may fail to capture many aspects of ones' personality.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,203,674 describes a method and system for connecting and matching users in an electronic dating service. Users are connected for a brief period, and are allowed further contact with each other if both request so.
Collaborative Filtering is the concept of predicting the opinion of one user on an item, based on his opinion on other items, and the opinions of other users on that item and the other items.
The publication “Item-Based Top-N Recommendation Algorithms” by Mukund Deshpande and George Karypis (published in “ACM Transactions on Information Systems” Volume 22, Issue 1, pp. 143-177, 2004) describes one Collaborative Filtering algorithm.
The publication “Recommender System for Online Dating Service” by Lukas Brozovsky and Vaclav Petricek, proposes using Collaborative Filtering in online dating. However, as the authors acknowledge, Collaborative Filtering is not well suited for online dating, for the following reasons:                1. While one item can be recommended to a large number of users, it would be inappropriate to recommend the same person to a large number of people in a dating context.        2. Unlike a person-to-item match, a person-to-person match should be bilateral—each side should find the other desirable.        
There is an evident need for an efficient method for finding matches between people.